Eyes peek out of the apartment window of Najibullah Zazi, at the Vistas apartment complex in Aurora, on Saturday. Media reporters were camped out at the apartment complex though out the day trying to interview Zazi, who was never seen.

An al-Qaeda “associate” trained in terrorism during a clandestine trip to Pakistan, bent on carrying out a series of Madrid-style bombings in New York?

Or an earnest, hardworking immigrant putting in long hours at the wheel of an airport shuttle van, longing to grab onto a piece of the American dream?

Those are the competing images swirling around Najibullah Zazi, a 24-year-old Afghan-born man who has been living in Aurora since January, a man who found himself at the center of a multistate terrorism investigation and the subject of headlines across the country.

After three days of intense questioning, federal authorities appear to be leaning toward the darker portrait and arrested Zazi and his father in his Aurora apartment late Saturday.

The news caps a week in which Zazi has gone from being an almost completely anonymous man with an apartment in southeast Aurora, who said he dreams of citizenship and hopes that he could bring his wife to the United States, to perhaps the latest face in the war on terrorism.

The white-hot arc into the public’s consciousness in the age of the 24-hour news cycle began with a cross-country drive and a traffic stop on the George Washington Bridge as he crossed into New York.

The first sign of trouble came on the mile-long span across the Hudson River that takes motorists back and forth between New Jersey and New York.

On Sept. 10, Zazi was near the end of a two-day, cross-country drive in a rental car, intent on visiting friends and checking on a coffee-cart business in which he has an interest, one of his attorneys, Art Folsom, said. Zazi planned to fly home the next day.

For an Afghan man who had spent time in Pakistan, either of those things — driving a rental car into New York the day before the eighth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks or buying a one-way plane ticket — could have attracted the attention of authorities.

But according to Folsom, Zazi’s motives were pure.

Zazi needed a car in New York, but without a credit card — he declared bankruptcy last spring — he could not rent one. So, Folsom said, Zazi’s father rented him a car in Denver so he could drive to New York, where he planned to return it before flying home.

According to Folsom, Zazi said the officers told him they were conducting a routine series of random drug stops. They questioned him, circled his car with a dog, and then allowed him to leave, Folsom said.

One of the many unanswered questions, however, is whether it was a random drug check — or whether it was a covert move by investigators already looking at Zazi. Folsom, who has repeatedly said that he believes Zazi is a victim of circumstance, acknowledged that was possible, that the dog could have been sniffing for explosives, not drugs.

And Peter Sakaris, a retired FBI agent who served as an embedded military adviser in Afghanistan, said that if the traffic stop happened the way Zazi described it, it is curious.

“I’ve crossed that bridge a million times, and it’s never not busy,” Sakaris said. “To have a checkpoint on the bridge — I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but I find that unlikely.”

Zazi spent that night in Queens with a friend, Naiz Kahn.

Zazi’s troubles mounted the next day, after he parked the car while he checked on his coffee-cart business which, Folsom said, had to be moved in the wake of construction.

When he got back to the car — which contained his laptop computer — it was gone. He wasn’t sure at first if it had been stolen or towed away.

Folsom said that after several discussions with the rental car company, it was determined that the police had impounded it.

Zazi spent that night at the mosque where he worshiped when he lived in Queens, then flew back to Denver on Sept. 12, Folsom said.

Friend’s apartment raided

Early Monday morning, federal agents raided several apartments in Queens. One of them was Kahn’s — where Zazi had stayed three nights earlier.

One of the Kahn’s roommates told the New York Daily News that agents with guns swarmed the room. And Kahn told the newspaper that he was grilled about his friend, whom he named only as Najibullah.

Kahn told The Denver Post that the agents were circumspect about what they were looking for.

“You know,” they told him repeatedly, he said.

Over the next two days, Zazi found himself the subject of cascading news stories, including lurid reports in New York based on anonymous sources.

The Daily News quoted an unnamed official as saying that Zazi had “troubling connections” to al-Qaeda. That would be one of the tamer reports to come out of the New York media.

The New York Post followed with a report that the investigation was centered on a plot to detonate backpack bombs all over the city to “take out as many people as possible.” The anonymous report was attributed to a “federal law enforcement official.”

Reporters swarmed Zazi’s apartment off Smoky Hill Road in Aurora, where youngsters romped on a hillside and played with toy swords, and a nearby home where he once lived with an aunt and uncle.

Zazi said it was “impossible” that he had any tie to terrorists. Asked about reports he was an “extremist,” he answered with questions of his own.

“What is an extremist?” he asked. “What does that mean? I’m just a normal Muslim. I am not hardcore. Just normal. I pray five times a day. I fast during Ramadan. I am not an extremist. I sleep on a bed. Some people don’t sleep on beds. I do.”

He also professed a deep love for America, where he said he could pursue his religion in freedom.

“Nobody wants to leave America,” he said. “People die to come here.”

As questions swirled about what evidence — if any — the FBI had that he was a terrorist, Zazi’s attorney decided not to wait for federal agents to come to him. Instead, he arranged for Zazi to report to the 18-story Byron G. Rogers Federal Building, where the FBI offices are located, and submit to an interview.

That was Wednesday. After a little more than four hours, Folsom emerged from the building, believing that Zazi had answered all of the agents’ questions. An associate had stayed behind with Zazi while Folsom slipped into a restaurant and grabbed dinner.

A little later, Zazi returned to the building after being told that another “issue” had come up.

There, Zazi learned that FBI agents had executed search warrants at his apartment and his aunt and uncle’s home.

Late that night, after he and Zazi were whisked from the federal building in an FBI vehicle, Folsom stood wearily on a downtown street and talked about the day. Zazi, he said, had been asked a flurry of detailed questions. About his family. About his friends. About his travels. Times. Dates. Places. Agents had swabbed his mouth to get a DNA sample and taken fingerprints and handwriting samples.

Everything, Folsom said, was cordial.

“There was no good cop, bad cop scene,” Folsom said. “There were two FBI special agents who questioned him. They were very polite. They were very candid. They were of the utmost professionalism.”

During much of the interview, Zazi was in the midst of a fast as part of his observance of Ramadan. At 7:15 p.m., the point at which the fasting could end, the agents brought him a bottle of water and asked him if he wanted something from McDonald’s.

Zazi asked for a Filet-o-Fish sandwich with extra ketchup.

Folsom also offered his belief that if federal investigators had incriminating evidence on Zazi that they would not have allowed him to go home that night, something they did after follow-up interviews on Thursday and Friday.

“I think Mr. Zazi had the horrible misfortune of stopping to see a friend of his he’s known for years in New York, and that friend is under scrutiny,” Folsom said.

Evidence still a mystery

However, Sakaris, the former FBI agent, said there’s no way to judge what evidence investigators had — or didn’t have — simply from the fact that Zazi has apparently cooperated and been allowed to leave each day.

“If he’s being forthcoming, that’s great,” Sakaris said. “He may or may not be involved. But I don’t think you can draw a solid conclusion from that one way or the other.”

In New York, in the neighborhood where Zazi spent nearly a decade, people who knew him tried to reconcile the media reports with their own memories.

“Enter ye here in peace and security,” reads the etched glass railing that greets visitors to the Masjid Hazrat I Abubakr Mosque, the heart of the Flushing, N.Y., neighborhood where authorities raided three homes in the early hours last Monday.

When he lived in New York, Zazi regularly attended Friday services at the mosque and spent some of his first years in America on the sixth floor of a brick apartment building less than two blocks away.

One afternoon last week, a mass of teenage boys lingered in front of the mosque. They knew Zazi as “the doughnut guy,” a man who started his workday at 2 a.m. and brought the pastries left over from his coffee-cart business to mosque in the evenings before he slept.

Moving west

But Zazi suddenly stopped attending services about eight months ago, said mosque president Abdurahman Jalili. It was only when he returned for services on Sept. 11 that Jalili learned Zazi and his family moved to Aurora.

Since then, Zazi has been a constant presence in the neighborhood — on television, in the newspapers.

On Monday, authorities raided three apartments in Queens, N.Y., as part of the investigation involving Zazi.

Naiz Khan, 26, told The New York Times on Saturday that he was interviewed for eight hours Thursday at what he believed was the Brooklyn offices of the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District. He said he voluntarily provided his fingerprints, DNA samples and prints of the soles of his shoes.

A roommate submitted to a similar interrogation, the Times reported.

Each man told the Times they were repeatedly asked a series of questions about Zazi, who they said had spent the night of Sept. 10 sleeping in their apartment.

“He put us into trouble,” Khan told the Times. “Why do they have to bother me and my roommates? Why do they have to go to my father’s house?”

By the end of the week, Zazi was the subject of various national media reports, all of them citing anonymous sources, that had him tied to terrorists, in possession of bomb-making plans and even playing a key role in a planned attack.

Saturday morning, Zazi and Folsom broke off their conversations with the FBI after three long days.

They both denied the various reports, asking their own question: If Zazi had known ties to terrorists, had bomb-making plans on his laptop computer, had admitted that he was involved in a plot to attack Americans, then why was he allowed to go home?

That question may have been answered with Saturday night’s arrests, but many other questions surrounding Zazi linger.

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